Friday’s Finds

On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

I was in Long Beach in 2012 when Nick Hanauer gave his, “It’s absolute bullshit that the rich are job creators” TED talk. I was so eager to share it with co-workers and friends, I checked the TED site every day waiting for them to post it. I gave up after six months

It eventually showed up on YouTube but I don’t think TED ever put it on their site or even linked to it. I’m surprised they welcomed him back to the main stage just a couple years later. —@kims

Video: Rich people don’t create jobs

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

Note: Regular readers may have noticed that my blog posts are rather infrequent at this time. I am taking a break from blogging through the Summer and intend to be back this Autumn. There are over 3,500 older posts always available to peruse here.

“Everyone is tired because individually we’re trying to do all the things that can only really be achieved by communal living.” via @gemelliz

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” —John Kenneth Galbraith (2002)

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

Note: Regular readers may have noticed that my blog posts are rather infrequent at this time. I am taking a break from blogging through the Summer and intend to be back this Autumn. There are over 3,500 older posts always available to peruse here.

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” —Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD)

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“Q. You know what AI is best at?

A. Propaganda”
—@GeorgeSnorwell

“I saw a post that asked: why is divestment political but investment is not? And I can’t stop thinking about it.” —@JackieGardina

“When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution … Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.” —Paul Virilio, Philippe Petit, Sylvère Lotringer (1999) Politics of the Very Worst

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.” —Jonathan Swift, via Ron Dyck

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“Definition: Conspiracy Theory
—A belief that the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community, who have spent their lives researching the subject, missed something you figured out in two minutes due to your superior Google researching skills.” —Meanwhile in Canada

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” —Carl Sagan (1995) The Demon-haunted World

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” —André Gide (1869-1951)

“You steal from one person and you’re a thief. You steal from everyone and you’re an AI company.” —Aral Balkan

“I’m going to exaggerate slightly, but it seems like one of the first applications of any new technology is making things even shittier for artists.” —Neal Stephenson, on generative AI

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“We were made to rote-learn science without adopting the scientific mindset and scientific ways of thinking, philosophy of science. The result is a population with bigoted, dogmatic people even having degrees in engineering and science without having the scientific temperament or critical thinking skills.” —@impactology

My grandpa was a Nazi, by @bastianallgeier

My grandpa taught me that Nazis are fantastic storytellers. The new Nazis are on Tiktok and elsewhere on social media, telling great stories. Stories of safety, of simplicity, of order and justice. Stories of lives without crises. Adventure stories.

The only way to look at all of this is from the distant future. What happens if we let the Nazis take over again. How would our world look like in 20 or 30 years from now. I shudder from the thought. There is no option that fascism would ever lead to anything else than destruction.

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds. Here are the highlights of 2023.

January

“ChatGPT gets treated like technological magic, but that ignores the humans behind the curtain that make it function. OpenAI paid Sama to hire Kenyan workers at $1.32 to $2 an hour to review ‘child sexual abuse, bestiality, murder, suicide, torture, self harm, and incest’ content. Their work made the tool less toxic, but left them mentally scarred. The company ended the contract when they found out TIME was digging into their practices”. —Paris Marx

February

“Since we’re a social species, it is intelligent for us to convince ourselves of irrational beliefs if holding those beliefs increases our status and well-being. Dan Kahan calls this behavior ‘identity-protective cognition’ (IPC).

By engaging in IPC, people bind their intelligence to the service of evolutionary impulses, leveraging their logic and learning not to correct delusions but to justify them. Or as the novelist Saul Bellow put it, ‘a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.’” —Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things

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On the last Friday of each month, without any assistance from Gen AI, I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

Disinformation, Misinformation, or Propaganda?

1. A video posted directly by Israel’s Defence Forces claimed that it had found Hamas weapons and technology, as well as a “list of terrorist names” in Arabic, showing each agents’ rota guarding Israeli hostages under the Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital in Gaza. However, a translation of the document shows that it contains no names but instead a calendar of the days of the week. Vedika Bahl explains in this episode of Truth or Fake. —France24 2023-11-16

2. Before [Preston] Manning’s real Public Health Emergencies Governance Review Panel of 2023, there was his imagined COVID Commission of 2023.

To read both is to behold the fantasy evolve into reality. Although the Smith government gave him a panel and a $2-million budget for research and support — they also endowed him with the restraints of reality, one supposes — many conclusions essentially remained the same. —CBC 2023-11-23

3. Right-wing U.S. media covered fiction as fact: A non-existent terrorist attack from Canada at Rainbow Bridge — “I have been sounding the alarm bell about the northern border for a long time,” said Vivek Ramaswamy [US Republican Presidential candidate] during a lengthy interview about an incident he did not witness, was not a subject-matter expert on, and had no insight into. —CBC 2023-11-22

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